Better in Darkness

A Biography of Henry Adams
His Second Life, 1862-1891

by Edward Chalfant

This second volume of the life of Henry Adams tells a rounded story of a man, a marriage, the epic history he wrote, and the covert role he played in the politics of late nineteenth-century America. Based on new evidence, it gives a startlingly different picture and an unexpectedly new experience of Adams’s life.

Better in Darkness follows Henry into his mature years - first as a Harvard professor, later as a writer and behind-the-scenes Washington power. With his marriage to Clover Hooper in 1870, his story becomes the biography of a remarkable union, shattered by Clover’s suicide in 1885. This is also a book about Adams’s History of the United States and its part in creating an American mythology. Finally, it shows Henry Adams as a diplomat, politician, interceder in presidential elections, discoverer of the full nature of the gold conspiracy of 1869, and successful opponent of a putative Blaine administration.

The extraordinary scope of this book takes in a whole world and gives new perspectives on figures from Napoleon to Karl Marx, and the friends and colleagues such as John Hay, Ulysses Grant, and others who filtered through the rich fabric of Adams’s middle years.

About the Author

Edward Chalfant is Professor of English Emeritus at Hofstra University and former director of the American Studies program there. For other volumes in his massive trilogy on the life of Henry Adams, see:

Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams, His First Life, 1838-1862

Improvement of the World: A Biography of Henry Adams, His Last Life, 1891-1918